If You Could Rid The Earth Of One Thing What Would It Be? (Frankie – 2008)

(This piece appeared as part of a writing exercise on the above topic in Frankie magazine.)

I decided to rid the earth of religion. The exact process was mysterious, involved a lot of forms and tickled a bit. I was led into a secret basement beneath Frankie HQ with multicoloured moss, posters of bands from 2034 and the faint smell of caramel popcorn. I was put through a ‘thought sorter’ which was like a personal Gravitron where I could see my mindscapes like fireworks. Some guys in hoodies came and stamped something onto my leg with a fluro typewriter. I was sat down at a desk and given a pen by a beautiful archangel in a petticoat. She had ruby eyes and an inbuilt theremin. I read the fine print and signed off on religion forever. The archangel smiled and we ate crumpets. She said I’d have to restart myself for the effects to take place. I took a lift back to land, caught a taxi home, and fell asleep in a beanbag.

I woke up and got on the Internet. It was strange. I looked up ‘bible’ and Wikipedia said it was the world’s best selling piece of fiction by ‘anonymous.’ The Pope was an ‘entertainer,’ and typing ‘Christian’ into Google got me a Christian Slater fansite. I stepped outside and went down the street to my local church. The stained glass windows had turned clear, and there was a beer garden outside. I rang my Mother and asked her who Jesus was and she sounded confused. ‘He led the roman’s I think.’ For days I dragged a methodical comb over society, trying to gauge the effects I’d induced. At first the signs were obvious – all the worship temples around the world had been transformed into marketplaces, pubs and libraries. All religious scriptures were now ‘Penguin Classics.’ On Sunday mornings people gathered in parks and had something between a town meeting and a counseling session. They weren’t so bad. There were sausages and a few laughs.

After five or so years I read a startling fact in the paper. Apparently depression rates and suicide had risen dramatically over the last five years. The experts blamed global warming and David Letterman being cancelled. My decision hadn’t done much to ease global tension, and civil wars were still bubbling away over oil, nuclear weapons and soccer.

The next morning God appeared. Actual God. Turns out he/she did exist. God didn’t make a huge entry. Just turned up in the corner of every living room on the planet simultaneously, and proceeded to introduce him/herself. God was like looking at the rainbow that appears when you’re watering the garden. Pure colours. The idea of a face. Not unlike Tilda Swinton. God was pretty cute. Strangely, people didn’t go berserk or faint or anything like that. God had a very calming, subduing presence, like a hug from a parent. At this time and place it seemed to make sense.

Truth is, no one really knew what to do as they’d never experienced a desire to worship before. God was quite modest and didn’t really want a fuss made, so he/she was just treated as another member of the family. God possessed divine knowledge, and was great for advice, but was diplomatic as well. For example: if you asked about your maths homework, God would often just give you the answer – but when quizzed about why Rwanda happened God gazed off in the distance and ate a banana. Hilarious, intelligent, heart breaking and a little bit nuts – God was the ultimate friend. Sometimes, people got militant about their relationship with God and abused others for failing to love him/her enough. When this got too heated God would zap them with a blue laser and they’d chill out. It was a pretty good system.

Comments

Do you do much religion stuff in your show? I recently saw the Tim Minchin DVD – amazing guy!

I had this thought on religion – what if we all lined up at the Pearly Gates and God was there deciding who was in and who was out. To everyone’s surprise it went like this…
Religious people who lived their life FOR God so that they would be accepted into Heaven were seen for what they are – SELFISH, only in it for themselves – no ticket.
Athiests that spent their life actually being good just because they were, um, good – well this was recognised by God and wham bam thank you mam.

I just read your ‘Who am I’ section, in full. You dont need me to tell you this, but you are a pretty amazing guy. You have done and acheived things that i would kill to do, and probably kill not to do. You sound kind of similar to me at my age now, 16. I hope that by the time i am your age i have acheived even close to the amount of things you have done in comedy and music. It is people like yourself that inspire me to be different, and to overcome the challenges that constantly afront the weird ones like us. Mt only criticism is that a even an ironic 9 hour marathon of ‘You’re the Voice” is 9 hours to long. Good luck to you 🙂

Dave, that’d be supreme irony huh? Imagine being Christian and not only realising that you hadn’t got into heaven, but your atheist friend had! I personally find it pretty amusing how 100% certain aesthiests are that there isn’t a god. Like they definitely know. Mathematically, the Christian God makes as much sense as no God at all. Let’s worship MATHS! Atheists are also, in some ways, more preachy than Christians, I mean, if you’re sitting there hammering your agenda onto others then you don’t have much right to begrudge others doing the same. Can’t we all just get along? One world. One cup of tea. One handjob. That’s all it could take.

Dude love the new song on jjj and just read ya life story. Pretty far out. But I kept expecting you to realize there is no god – were all sweaty hairless apes from Africa, imaginary childhood friends are not real, there is absolutely nothing to worship and nothing to worry about. And when u die u just go back to the same state as u were before you were born. Hows that for Preachy. (Just kidding! we are all put here by the sky fairy who makes earthquakes and kills puppys with cars)

I’m meant to be working. Working is transcribing stuff from audio into document form. It’s very boring.

And I am also trying to write something for The Big Issue because they have said that they will actually like something I’ve submitted to them and could I reformat it into a My Word section? And so now even though I’ve read plenty of Big Issue issues, I am also reading the My Word samples that have come attached to their return email.

One of those examples is yours, and so then I Googled you, even though I still haven’t finished your My Word article and I already have 14 other webpages open. Then I read the long story version of your About section, and then I found this.

I think it’s so cool that you mention Christianity. I think it’s even cooler that you have ditched Christianity but still believe in God. Which is sort of where I am. And I miss Jesus because whether or not he existed, all of those words ascribed to him in the bible still resonate.

God still resonates too but there are less and less words able to be ascribed to God without it sounding exactly the opposite of what you are trying to say or describe. So I guess Nietschke (sp?) was right. In a fashion.

And anyway, maybe God goes better as a space and a silence an an unword, in a world that is so noisy 🙂

Hi Sue,
Thanks for your comment. Jesus said cool things. Religion made it so you can’t wank or be gay. Pretty simple. Get your own spiritual. Words are clumsy when handling fifth dimension stuff. It’s beyond colours, man. As Beckett said: “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.”